As Mrs Thatcher observed in New York last Tuesday, the 1970s have not been a good decade for the western democracies. In south-east Asia, in Africa, in central Asia the...

Ferdinand Mount Being an architect used to be such a nice profession. You could refer proudly to 'my son the architect' in a way that you could not to 'my son the traffic...

Here we are, overflowing with Christmas spirit, our thoughts turning inevitably to Christmassy things like, for example, Mr Clement Freud. The Liberal MP for the Isle of Ely and...

Auberon Waugh Nothing could be more appropriate than that two members of the Churchill family should step forward at this difficult moment in the nation's history to fill the...

Peter Kemp I referred with some pessimism in a previous article (8 December) to the outlook for a cease-fire in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Now I read that, whereas the news of a basic...

Mary Churchill paid a brief visit to Paris in 1946 with her father. There she met Christopher Soames, a Coldstreamer, an assistant military attache at the Embassy, and fell in...

N icholas von Hoffman Washington Her Attila the Hen soubriquet beat her to these shores, but it is handed round here more in admiration than derision. The Rhodesian ceasefire...

Peter Nichols Rome A group of three or four boys broke into the house of a woman in a small town near Rome and stole some money and a few not very valuable possessions. She...

Wilfred De'Ath Next week I expect to celebrate my first Catholic Christmas by attending Midnight Mass at St Thomas's Roman Catholic Church in North Fulham, quite near to where...

J. A. G. Griffith The prosecution pending against the New Statesman for contempt of court is clearly the wrong issue before the wrong tribunal, The issue is whether an article...

Patrick Marnham Are the Israelis about to kidnap Idi Amin? According to last week's reports, Amin is living with one wife and a few children 'in a lonely beach house on the...

Richard West In February of this year I wrote an article for the Spectator based on Paul Erdman's frightening and prophetic thriller The Crash of79, written as long ago as...

What can be done with aged clergymen who are really only fit for an almshouse, but under the existing laws of the Church of England have the charge of a parish? The case of Mr...

Christopher Booker Ten years ago, at the end of the Sixties, I contributed to these colums an article called 'Backward into the Seventies', which I ended with the expression of...

Benny Green So far as the creative muse at Christmas is concerned, there is just no telling. Sometimes the conduct is unseasonable without being unreasonable, as in the case of...

Harold Nicolson This article was first published in the Spectator on 5 October 1951 Professor Gustave Le Bon, were he alive today, would observe with professional satisfaction...

Mary Kenny Anyone who imagines that the British charity? I think the first, the most imporpublic's attitude to charity is fatigued or tant, is trust. That is the key to the...

Peter Ackroyd I had been asked to write an article about tattooing — a difficult subject and one not quite to my taste, but I needed the money. The research, as always, was...

Sir: Obviously Mr Waugh doesn't have much or he wouldn't be so paranoid at other people finding out about it (8 December). Guilt-ridden Catholic schoolboys are always a problem...

Sir: It seems appropriate that some tribute should be paid to the late Goronwy Rees in the journal of which he was once an assistant editor. I only came to know him well in the...

Sir: Christopher Booker writes (17 November) that 'the other day "A. Spokesman" for the dear old doomed Metrication Boad was still solemnly trying to persuade me that "between...

Sir: John Mortimer's 'Postscript' or tailpiece on erotica (24 November) betrays curious logic. Of course Forum is poor as 'pornography' since it is not intended as such....

Sir: I think I may be responsible for stopping your television critic watching Testament of Youth (8 December) — it's not the marrow season is it? I told him one day that Vera...

Sir: Summarily dismissing the points I made (Letters, 27 October) as 'vehement nationalism' does not do Mr T. Garton Ash credit and smacks of gratuitous and unnecessary abuse...

Sir: I am at present engaged in research for a book on the life and work of Kenneth Tynan, and I would be very grateful to hear from anyone who has letters, anecdotes,...

Paul Ableman Reviewing is not a science. Five critics can honestly produce five different estimates of the same book. They may all be wrong or, more probably, all partly right....

Auberon Waugh The British Aristocracy Mark BenceJones and Hugh MontgomeryMassingberd (Constable £6.95) On page 172 of this admirable new study of the British aristocracy,...

Jonathan Keates The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor Ed. Sally Fitzgerald (Faber £8.25) Flannery O'Connor was hardly the most fortunate of American writers. In...

Alan Watkins Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles Paul Levy (Weidenfeld £12.50) 'It is not far-fetched', Mr Levy writes, 'to see the current domestic habits of...

Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd Queen Victoria's Sketchbook Marina Warner (Macmillan £8.95) Insubstantial Pageant Jeffrey L. Lant (Hamish Hamilton £12.50) Louisa Lady in Waiting...

Jeffrey Meyers Smile Please Jean Rhys (Deutsch £4.95) Jean Rhys was born only two years after Katherine Mansfield, lived for 56 years after Mansfield's death and died in her...

David Gilmour The Rabin Memoirs Yitzhak Rabin (Weidenfeld £10) The Israeli Mind John Laffin (Cassell E5.95) 'I do not think Nasser wanted war,' declared General Rabin shortly...

Mirabel Cecil The Land of England Dorothy Hartley (Macdonald and Jane's £6.95) Country Wisdom Gail Duff (Pan £1) The distinguished author of that invaluable stoveside...

Peter Jenkins The Wild Duck (Olivier) The National Theatre's production of Ibsen's first great masterpiece largely mis ses the point which is the wild duck. This maimed bird in...

John McEwen Rory McEwen's new work, watercolours of single leaves, on calf-skin vellum (Taranman, 236 Brompton Road, till 14 January), is the best of his career. McEwen long...

Rodney Milnes Julius Caesar (Coliseum) Welsh National Opera (Dominion) The English National Opera's first (and I piously hope not last) stab at a Handel opera is an occasion...

Peter Ackroyd The Black Hole ('U', Odeon, Leicester Square) Star Trek: The Motion Picture ('U', Empire, Leicester Square) I'm sure that I saw wires, during The Black Hole, when...

Richard Ingrams A few weeks ago I did a short interview for one of those two-minute God Slots on the radio called Thought for the Day, Pause to Reflect or something of that...

Tak i Sandra J arvis-Daly Khashoggi's latest caper is not surprising. Her fat, unattractive, oily arms dealer of an ex-husband taught her at an early age to seek the company of...

Jeffrey Bernard It was during a not very interesting fire in a block of flats that I was staying in recently that the conversation in the stair-well between several rather...

John Mortimer Events of this week have but confirmed the suspicion that has grown on me since the far off, unpleasant day, when I first saw a goal post: sport brings out the...